Catmachine

It is odd how sometimes we can get so wound up over nothing. Literally. How often have you heard someone say that they're afraid of the dark or hate the cold? A visitor from another reality whose only experience of this one is our communication could be forgiven for thinking that these qualities, along with their cousin silence, were active, sometimes malignant, presences in our universe. Even some primitive human philosophers used to think of cold and dark as distinct properties, yins to the yangs of heat and light. But of course they're not. They're not anything, because they don't exist. Far from being the opposite of heat and light, they are simply their absence. If anything heat and light are the interlopers, streams of subatomic particles (or waves depending upon which side of the quantum bed you got up this morning) bombarding matter, buffeting it. This constant assault is the price we pay for being warm and for being able to see. The natural state of the unive...

I realise that in the last entry I made a fundamental error describing the death and birth as a "border" in the sense I was using it. Whilst they are points on a boundary between being and not-being , they're not points on a border that anyone can cross. So I reiterate that there isn't really such a thing as being dead . One could say that not being alive is describable, if only as the absence of an actual state, but actually having a word for it, dead , seems odd when you think about it. After all, we don't have a separate word for not being in pain , despite the fact that (hopefully) it is the state in which we spend most of our lives. You might think I'm playing games with words here. That might be the case, but words themselves are immensely powerful. In my continuing study into what makes us into conscio us , I have discovered (mainly through reading and thought experiments as practical investigation in this field is tricky for the amateur) that in...

There is one border we don't usually get to linger on; we only ever cross it twice. That is the border between being alive and not being alive. The checkpoints are one way only, and are named Birth and Death. When we think about it this way, we realise there's no such thing as " being dead ". From a materialist point of view, the state before birth and the state after death are the same thing. And yet there's no way, for example, I'd describe myself as having been " dead " in 1960. Yet logically there's no difference whatsoever. Whatever makes you you is your mind, and even though hardcore materialists claim that's all smoke and mirrors, your consciousness has a definite existence however it's derived. So, unconventional theories of time and mind aside, any time period during which your consciousness doesn't exist is no different from another. So we die, but we are never dead. For instance: Where is Douglas Adams ? He's...